Gladdeningly inclusive, like a hug from Walt Whitman: declarative and fraught and good.
Novelist and cultural commentator Shields (the nonfictional Black Planet, 1999, etc.) explores “his own damned, doomed character” in this plum collection of vignettes.
What he’s trying to get at in these pages is the mystery of identity, cutting to the bone as he explores the “impulse to write autobiographically, to turn oneself into one's subject.” It's reflective work, and grueling, but Shields is comfortable in the world of words; he has “trouble living anywhere other than language,” believing like Rousseau that “perception is enhanced by temporal and psychic distance, that memory produces illuminations which observation didn't.” He is also acutely aware, as basketball coach Bobby Knight has said, that “all of us learn to write by the second grade, then most of us go on to other things.” These short bursts of self-revelation have both precise and riffing qualities: Shields will nimbly and coolly pick apart just how and why he botched a romance or manipulated his assistant editor on the high-school paper, then just as nimbly he'll encapsulate how his father helped shape his life: “to not accept accepted wisdom, to insist on my own angle, to view language as a playground, and a playground as bliss.” The monkey bars led him to sports, where he found refuge from his stutter and felt the joy of being alive. Then he stopped playing after an injury, “and I rarely if ever feel that joy anymore and it's my own damn fault and that's life.” His fallback is writing, and like one of his characters, “he wants gorgeous written language to be a revenge upon the Babel of his spoken language.” Shields makes it easy to identify with his confusions and screw-ups and ambivalences, but his insightfulness and careful consideration are his canny talent.
Gladdeningly inclusive, like a hug from Walt Whitman: declarative and fraught and good.Pub Date: May 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-2578-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s...
Music journalist and musician Wald (Talking 'Bout Your Mama: The Dozens, Snaps, and the Deep Roots of Rap, 2014, etc.) focuses on one evening in music history to explain the evolution of contemporary music, especially folk, blues, and rock.
The date of that evening is July 25, 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, where there was an unbelievably unexpected occurrence: singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, already a living legend in his early 20s, overriding the acoustic music that made him famous in favor of electronically based music, causing reactions ranging from adoration to intense resentment among other musicians, DJs, and record buyers. Dylan has told his own stories (those stories vary because that’s Dylan’s character), and plenty of other music journalists have explored the Dylan phenomenon. What sets Wald's book apart is his laser focus on that one date. The detailed recounting of what did and did not occur on stage and in the audience that night contains contradictory evidence sorted skillfully by the author. He offers a wealth of context; in fact, his account of Dylan's stage appearance does not arrive until 250 pages in. The author cites dozens of sources, well-known and otherwise, but the key storylines, other than Dylan, involve acoustic folk music guru Pete Seeger and the rich history of the Newport festival, a history that had created expectations smashed by Dylan. Furthermore, the appearances on the pages by other musicians—e.g., Joan Baez, the Weaver, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Dave Van Ronk, and Gordon Lightfoot—give the book enough of an expansive feel. Wald's personal knowledge seems encyclopedic, and his endnotes show how he ranged far beyond personal knowledge to produce the book.
An enjoyable slice of 20th-century music journalism almost certain to provide something for most readers, no matter one’s personal feelings about Dylan's music or persona.Pub Date: July 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236668-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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